A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1342 - 1342: The Young General Slayer - Part 8

The crown on top of his head was one that he had been given, by the natural cycle of succession. And then it was one that he had kept, through what could quite well be argued to be an abuse of power. It might well have sat on a true hero's head, in the form of Arthur. The Stormfront might well have been blessed once more to have a Warrior King sat well upon its throne.

Instead, they had this pudgy man, with his pale skin, and his stuttering steps. He made the journey to the stairs seem like a difficulty. It seemed to Oliver it was the men around him, in the form of his guards, that elevated his status. There were two Fourth Boundary knights there. One could tell it from presence alone.

Even those uninitiated into the Boundaries could likely feel it – and they would attribute that tension, and that difficulty in breathing, all to the High King. Thinking it to be the godly presence bestowed upon royalty.

The trumpets continued, preventing any opportunity for conversation. All the way up the stairs. It was a long procession, and the High King did not do anything to make it shorter. One would have hoped, that when he entered the throne room, that the trumpets would have stopped. But they continued for a while after, even after the High King disappeared from sight.

Only after a time did they stop, when Oliver had to assume that the man had reached his throne.

"Greetings, nobles of the Stormfront," a voice resonated around them. It sounded like something spoken down a tunnel. It wasn't the resounding voice of a General, known to carry far and wide. As Oliver looked around for the source of it, he felt a tap on his shoulder, and he followed the pointing of Skullic's finger.

There, winding around the pillars that held the entryway to the throne room up, were several wide bronze tubes, coming together in cone shaped protrusions. It was from those cones that the noise came. Oliver assumed that the High King must have been speaking into some sort of tube in the throne room, though he had to say, he had not seen the evidence of such a device his last time in the Capital.

"We gather together today in celebration," the High King said. "To celebrate history being made. To celebrate the surpassing of our ancestors. We plunge our sword right into the heart of the Verna. We gave General Blackwell our expectations. We knew the time was ripe.

And the man returns to us, having delivered."

Oliver twisted his face at that. The wording made it sound as if this were all a plan of the High King, believing, in his immense cunning, that they were rightly placed to take care of the Verna in battle. In truth, he knew the man had expected nothing from the efforts in the East but failure. The man had seemed to go as far as to hope for them.

He'd wanted to see Blackwell crushed, and now the man returned to him elevated, and there was naught he could do but sing his praises.

"He is a man that was humbled by failure, and in Stormfront fashion, he used that only to sharpen his sword, and become a greater man for it," the High King said.

Oliver rolled his eyes. The High King seemed intent on sticking to that story to the very end. All who had served under Blackwell knew that the first campaign was far from the failure that it was purported to be. The first campaign was what laid the seeds for the fatal blow that they had achieved in the second campaign.

Without those three castles having been captured, and the first Verna army having been beaten back, they would not have managed to stir the hornet's nest enough to deal them a crushing blow on the battlefield, nor would they have had the positioning necessary to invite them to such a battle.

Though Blackwell had made clear his disappointment with Oliver, for his lagging capacities as a leader, and though he had consented to the atrocity that Karstly had proposed to him, that did not mean that Oliver's own vision of Blackwell's achievements were tainted.

He knew that, no matter what was to be said about him, Blackwell was a Great General, of the grandest of proportions, and he knew very well that there was much to be learned from his example. It was in measuring himself against Blackwell that he knew himself to be as lacking as he was.

The High King continued to weave his serpentine speech, attributing more of the success of the campaign to himself than ought to have been allowable. If there was ever a good time for an assassination, then that would have been it. Of course, it wasn't as if the Patrick men had an assassin… At least not one that could be described as stealthy.

Though in thinking it, Oliver found himself checking the pillars, and evaluating the crowd, wondering if he really could just sneak his way inside for a single killing blow. But then there would be no getting away. It would be his life for the High King's.

And though the High King had been an everlasting thorn in Oliver's side, he wasn't sure if he respected him enough to be willing to trade one life for another…

"For his duty to the kingdom of Stormfront, naturally, our Lord Blackwell shall be duly rewarded. His lands lie within the territory of Silver King Emerson, and the discussions have been had to make room for Lord Blackwell's expansion. His new domain shall stretch westwards from Ernest, all the way to the sea. And we, as the people of the Stormfront, can know to celebrate that too.

With a defender as mighty as Lord Blackwell, Yarmdon ships will have greater difficulty in making it to our shore."

It seemed the most weighty of rewards. It was an incredible amount of land, after all. But Oliver was familiar with the land given, naturally, since he had spent so many years there. What it encompassed, truly, were endless rolling plains, a handful of villages, and, a new problem, in the form of the beach that needed defending.

The only boon, really, was the Black Mountains, and the bounty offered by the forests of it – now Blackwell would have more access to that than ever. However, at the same time, he also shared a longer border with the Yarmdon. He had already struggled to keep their mountain pathway closed. Now he seemed likely to struggle even further.